Do Democracies Select More Educated Leaders?

This paper tests whether education levels di¤er between leadersselected in autocracies and democracies. We use a unique data seton over 1300 world leaders between 1848 and 2004 and exploit withincountry variation from transitions to and from democracy to show thatdemocracies pick more highly educated leaders. The results are ro-bust to a wide range of speci cations, controls and ways of measuringeducation and democracy.[...]